I was fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to cover ad:tech Chicago as a guest blogger for Adrants.com this past week. Adrants, for those not familiar with the publication, provides marketing and advertising news in the form of a website and daily email newsletter. Adrants' content is provided by current and former industry practitioners, and the publication seeks to provide insightful, informed, experiential, and no holds barred commentary on the state of the advertising and media industries.

If you are in the communications industry, you are probably familiar with ad:tech. The event, now in it's tenth year, brings together some of the best minds in the business for roundtable discussions on all things digital, specifically how the digital revolution has permeated every aspect of advertising, marketing and PR. This year, ten ad:tech shows will occur in seven countries, making it the preferred resource and destination for digital marketers around the world.

For my coverage of the event, along with that of several other industry peeps, visit the the ad:tech blog .

Here are just a few notions that I took away from the event:

1. For most agencies, "digital" still only represents 15-20% of project work (unless, of course, you are a solely digital agency like Razorfish). While these percentages will inevitably grow, traditional mediums like print and television will continue to represent the majority of any agencies' workload. However, we are sure to see the cross-pollination of traditional and digital campaigns.

2. With clients tightening their belts when it comes to their communications budgets, the importance of metrics and analytics is paramount to any campaign. Simply put, we in the industry need to justify our services in term of ROI at a micro-level beyond what has been traditionally offered to our clients. The good news is that the digital realm adds analytical insights to our arsenal that were not available to our predecessors.

3. "This is the year of mobile." OK, not so much. At one of the keynote roundtables, the adroit speakers hypothesized that it will not be until 2014 that we will see the American consumer embrace mobile advertising in the way their counterparts in Europe, Africa and Asia have. This is not to say that mobile campaigns do not have a place in the present day marketing-mix; they do when approached in the simpliest manner (i.e. SMS, a technology that the consumer has already adopted and is not exlcusive in terms of mobile hardware).

And there was much more, which you'll find covered in detail on the ad:tech blog. Thanks to Adrants for the opportunity. I hope to be back next year!